7 US States That Didn’t Recognize The Armenian Genocide Until Recently

September 11, 2017Maria Mancic

You might think that if there was a genocide anywhere in the world, it would be the globally accepted event and the reminder that the human race could easily sink, but the 7 US states that didn’t recognize the Armenian genocide until recently prove that this doesn’t always have to be the case. But more importantly, it explains that there might be a lot more cases of the genocide in the world than we are familiar with.

The Armenian Genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust, occurred during the World War I and it lasted from 1914 until 1923. This was the Ottoman government’s annihilation and extermination of Armenian people, mostly citizens of the Ottoman Empire.

Pixabay/Public Domain

During this time, around 1.5 million Armenians were exterminated by the Ottoman Empire. This was carried out in two stages: the mass killing of able-bodied Armenians, followed by the second stage that included deportation to elderly people, as well as underaged children and their mothers and forcing them into the death marches in the Syrian Desert.

The heir of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkey, later acknowledged these incidents, but the government refused to acknowledge it as the genocide. But the government took one step further and pressured other countries, mostly its allies, to do the same. It ended up with only 28 countries, not counting Armenia, recognizing this event as the genocide. You can also check what those countries that recognized the Armenian genocide were, but to spare you some bigger effort, I can tell you that the most of them were European countries, while only Lebanon (in 1997) and Syria (in 2015) out of all Asian countries officially recognized this event as a genocide.

As a matter of fact, there were not so many American countries that recognized it as genocide as well, because even the former president Obama wanted to avoid using the term ‘Genocide’ in this matter so that Turkey government wouldn’t be offended. This act of his was seen as cowardly by many. This is why many states took this matter into their hands and officially recognized the Armenian genocide. One after another, other states followed their step and nowadays, there are 46 states that officially recognized the Armenian Genocide.